My monograph from the Tennyson Society is finally out! It arrived as a stressful personal week was already taking a turn for the better, and what a gift. The project grew out of a question posed by my supervisor during my PhD first-year review: “Why don’t you look more into the contents of the glossary?” […]
Author Archives: Sarah
Truth Is Stranger than Fiction: The Story of Henry Kemble
One of my favorite Victorians is John Mitchell Kemble, a friend of Tennyson’s and Thackeray’s who was a pioneering scholar of Anglo-Saxon (Old English). When I was writing my dissertation on Tennyson’s interest in the history of the English language, Kemble frequently threatened to take over because he was so – well, boisterous is the […]
My Day Job
I’m an independent scholar. Although this is a growing demographic in the parched land of academia, people still ask me what that means when they see the phrase on my conference name tag. At its simplest, it means that the money I use to buy my groceries, tea mugs, and airplane tickets to visit friends […]
A shock in the stacks
The defining goal of academic research is to create new knowledge. In literary studies, I’ve taken it as pretty much a given that there’s very little in the way of new facts to be discovered from scratch, though there is plenty of work to be done in assembling the many facts into sensible shape to […]
Shoveling sand & celebrating
Last year, I watched a documentary that depicted one scholar’s efforts to determine exactly how much of his ear Van Gogh cut off. That may not seem like a lot with which to fill an hour, but it was the most accurate portrayal of the research process I’ve ever seen. It can take a long time […]
Mummy peas in Tennyson’s garden?
Earlier this year, I suggested that “Victorian laughter” would be a good theme for a conference. This was partly because the adjective “Victorian” is often synonymous with an austere lack of humor — “we are not amused,” etc. — despite the evidence that the people of nineteenth-century Britain enjoyed a laugh as much as anyone […]
Can you rhyme “eyes” and “fantasies”?
Being a member of a Cambridge college has many perks, not least of which is exposure to the English choral tradition, which is alive and well in many a college chapel. In fact, it may be thanks to the evensongs of Trinity Hall that I came to think more deeply about the potential effects of […]
Minute marginalia with a big story
The photo above has a story that exemplifies what bibliographical detective work can reveal. First, I must introduce you to John Mitchell Kemble, one of my favorite Victorians. He was one of the first modern scholars of Old English — he produced the first British edition of Beowulf — and he did a lot to bring good […]